Just spotted the note below on Chris Hamilton-Emery’s Facebook profile and the Salt blog. Please do what you can to help Salt’s brave, ambitious, essential independent literary publishing to survive this rocky, rocky period. It’s not just about me, or even Chris, Jen and their family, or even the growing number of authors Salt supports, but it’s about you — the reader — and making sure that you continue to have the opportunity to expand your imaginative horizons in fresh and unexpected directions, directions increasingly denied you by the chain bookstores.

I hoped I’d never have to write this note. The recession has continued to have a very negative impact on sales at Salt and we’re finally having to go public to ask you to help support us.

Our sales are now 60% down on last year and have wiped out our grant and our cash reserves as we continue to market and publish what we can from what we believe is a great list. We’ve plans in place to help secure the business from November 2010 — though the books we’ll be publishing won’t deliver any real revenue until 2011. We’re sorry to ask, embarrassed to ask, but we need your help to survive until then and if you were considering purchasing a Salt book, we’d dearly love you to do it right now. We’ve less than one week’s cash left.

If you can help us, please do two things:

Buy one book from us — we don’t mind from where, it can be from your local bookstore (they need your support, too), it can be from Amazon or the BookDepository. It can even be directly from us. But please buy that book now.

Please tell everyone you know to do the same. Buy just one book and pass it on.